


Rescue Me

by LavenderLizards



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Fist Fights, Kidnapping, Rescue, drugged
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28646976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LavenderLizards/pseuds/LavenderLizards
Summary: Malcolm struggles to come to terms with the fact that Martin Whitly is now free.
Relationships: Malcolm Bright & Martin Whitly, Malcolm Bright/Dani Powell
Comments: 2
Kudos: 42





	Rescue Me

Malcolm had returned home in a daze. The city glittered around him like a cut gem. The lights shifted from green to yellow to red. Rain drizzled around the pulsing veins of the city streets. People walked and talked and life continued. But everything around him had slowed so significantly that he wondered if the world might start functioning in reverse. 

“But he killed 32 people,” Gil’s words reverberated off his skull, but he couldn’t focus on them. He wasn’t entirely sure how he responded to Gil. 

He told himself to focus on the case. The victim was found. She was safe. That was all that mattered, right?

Except that it wasn’t. 

Malcolm screwed his eyes shut and was hit with a wall of red, the smell of coppery lifeblood. He opened them again and held up his right hand, watching it violently shake, still able to see the smear of his father’s blood on it. He had washed it off, hours ago, but it was as if he could feel it on a cellular level. The blood had soaked into his flesh, down to his bone, travelled to his soul. 

He had hit his father, who was now a free man, and he bled.

He swallowed thickly, trying not to relive the moment, but failing. On the ride home, the car he was in came to a stop and the driver had to talk him back to reality for a solid minute. Embarrassed, he pulled a wad of cash out of his wallet and stepped out of the cab. Craning his neck up, he stared at his building. 

He was home.

If that’s what this was. 

Numbly, he trudged forward. He ascended. He opened the door to his place and walked into the empty space. Typically, just knowing that sunshine was here made him feel a little bit better. Today was not one of those days. 

No, the loft seemed to stretch out around him as gaining crests of silence loomed overhead, threatening to crash and drown him. He took a deep breath and had a flash of his father with a hysterical, bloody grin and a twinkle in his plotting eyes.

The world would carry one, life would continue. But the act of punching Martin had ripped something out of him, broke something inside him. He blinked blankly at his ‘home.’ He needed a drink. Or a Xanax. Or both. Yes, both sounded good. Walking towards his silver mini bar, his shaking hand reached for the decanter and a whiskey glass. 

The glass was cool to the touch, it’s cut crystal gathering the dim lighting and refracting it. As soon as the decanter was opened, the strong scent of fine whiskey wafted into the air. He set to filling up the glass with amber liquid and quickly poured it down his throat in a fashion that would have the most elite whiskey connoisseurs throwing daggers with their eyes. He wasn’t savoring it. Hell, he didn’t even taste it. All he noted was the harsh burn down his throat. 

He moved to his kitchen where he kept his medication. 

God, did he need a Xanax...but...he knew that if he took one, he’d get so tired. He rolled the orange bottle in his hand, listening to the rattle of the contents. The last thing he wanted - or needed - was a quicker route to sleep. He set the bottle back down, satisfied that he already felt numb enough without the aid of medication.

His chest vibrated, sobs clawing at his ribs, but he pushed them back into their bone and sinew cage. In a trance, he trudged to his bed and sat upon it’s soft surface. It dipped under his weight. The heating kicked on around him. The clock ticked beside his bed. But none of it registered. Time slowed to a crawl. His eyes were cold pools of shock, trained on the wood floor. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was how Malcolm Bright broke.

They had their most heated spat. The worst fight Malcolm had ever had with a family member, but was it his fault? 

Seeing Martin free, out in the real world, breathing fresh air...it was too much. The revelation that he was out was impossible to process. He had taken 23 lives and the potential of him going free - ever - had never even touched Malcolm’s mind. It was a shock he was unprepared for, as was the unbridled rage he felt when confronting Daddy dearest in the soft, domestic safety of his family home. 

After the first hit, he should have felt relieved, and yet...he couldn’t reconcile the act. He couldn’t move past the way that...punching his father...had made him feel. His body’s reaction to what he’d done. His mind’s attempt to grapple with it. There was something sickly sweet in the act, an attraction to the violence that left him breathless. It scared him down to the pit of his soul.

The smack of his knuckles connecting with Martin’s face lived as a phantom sensation in his hand. He opened his fingers and then closed them, even as they twitched, and swore that he could still see that crimson stain expanding over his flesh. It was hot and metallic and satisfying in a way that cutting himself never had been. 

No, this wasn’t harming himself; this wasn’t the tracks of healed over flesh that lived up his arms and down his legs. This was the result of taking the heft of his disdain, pointing the blade of his fury, and forcing it past the resistance of Martin’s forcefield - just like when he had stabbed Martin at Claremont. And once the blows were over and his arm hung, drawn back in suspension, as hit number five waited to fall, Malcolm’s breath wobbled. He watched the resulting wounds flourish like a blooming rose upon Martin’s cheek. He had savored watching his face twist in agony like a Renaissance painting being born in slow motion.

He had hit Dr. Whitly so hard that the spray of his cut lip littered Malcolm’s fine suit. 

He should toss it - shove the expensive fabric of his tie and dress shirt in the trash bin - but as he slid the tie off and held it between his cold fingers, seeing the blood there made his heart quicken. The material was so soft, forest green with a gentle shine, the drops against it appeared black. The marks were indelible, the blood and the silk would never exist apart from one another. 

Malcolm swallowed and put the tie down on his nightstand. With a heaving breath, he laid back on his bed. 

What was he going to do? Martin had covered up Ainsley’s misdeed by “taking care” of Endicott. And Malcolm covered up Ainsley’s misdeed by telling her that he was the one who had done the deed. 

Everything had been so convoluted, twisted and contorted until the lies looked good enough to pass, which meant that he’d have to lie to his team and to his mother. It all stood like a house of cards built on Malcolm’s fragile psyche.

So was it any wonder that he’d snapped? That he had grabbed Martin by his shirtfront and shoved him against the wall as he landed the first wild blow?

He wanted Martin to hit him back, to morph into the monster that everyone feared, that needed to be chained to the wall like a wild dog. But he remained nothing more than a fifty-something year old man who did nothing more than relish his own son’s coming apart in such a violent fashion. 

Malcolm wanted to punish Martin and be punished in return. He felt deserving of a beating and desperate for his father to rain down the physical manifestation of his internal pain. But Martin’s skilled surgical hands only held lightly to Malcolm’s suit until he could hold no more due to the hits. 

He never asked Malcolm to stop. He never put up a fight or got angry. He just...let Malcolm wail on him. 

Embarrassingly, when the hail storm of red subsided and Malcolm came back to himself, he realized that his cheeks were wet. Cool tears were slipping down his hot face and his lip was shaking. He had to pull himself off of Martin, whom he had ended up nearly straddling on the floor as he choked him with his left hand and hit him with his right.

It was wrong.

He wanted it to feel right, but it felt wrong.

His father was free and that made him mad. He wanted it to feel wrong that the monster was loose, he did, but it didn’t.

Malcolm rolled over and curled into a ball on his bed as the heater kicked off . He felt ill. A familiar sick sweet smell wafted up to him from his pillow and alarm bells deep in his memory began to blare.

He lifted his head, eyes wide, heart thudding against his ribs, and looked down at his pillow. He wanted to spring out of bed, to scramble away, but his limbs felt heavy.

He would know that smell anywhere.

Chloroform.

“No, no...no…” the arm propping him up collapsed, which brought him right back to the cotton pillow. 

The world around him began to dim as his panic crested. He clawed at consciousness, but the chloroform was dragging him under. His grip on reality began threading in and out as his breath evened. Maybe this was a blessing, a reprieve, maybe he should just lean into it.

"Ah, that's it," he heard Martin's familiar voice, warm as sun baked sand lapping against him. "Give in. Daddy's here."


End file.
